Department of Writing Studies

Writing in the 21st century is global, social, and digital. An e-mail message or Twitter post can span the entire globe in mere seconds. A common scholarly goal in this department is the sustained study of all aspects of writing and literacy practices—history and theory, production and circulation, material and digital, social and collaborative, textual and visual. Our work coheres around a common set of questions about the global, social, and digital literacies of our time.Photo by Matt Buchanan

Welcome to the Department of Writing Studies. Part of the University of Minnesota's College of Liberal Arts, we are an academic department with nationally recognized strengths in teaching and scholarship in rhetoric, writing, and technical communication.

The department touches the lives of nearly every undergraduate on campus through the First Year Writing program, as well as popular courses including technical writing and communication, professional writing, rhetorical theory, and digital communication. We are also the administrative home of the Center for Writing and the journal, Written Communication.

Graduates from our B.S., M.S., and certificate program are prepared for successful careers in scientific and technical communication and are in high demand by companies both local and national. Our M.A. and Ph.D. graduates pursue careers in academic settings, becoming college and university professors.

If you have any questions, please email or call us. Or stop in and visit us in Nolte Center on the Minneapolis campus.

During fall semester 2014, Dr. Lee-Ann Kastman Breuch and a team of Writing Studies students collaborated with Dr. Craig Weinert, MD, to conduct interviews with hospitalized patients regarding the sharing of doctors' progress notes (OpenNotes) at the University of Minnesota Medical Center. Students interviewed patients about what they understood about their condition from the notes, what they liked or disliked about the notes, and how they felt reading about themselves as patients. Preliminary results indicated that patients strongly favored receiving the notes, citing reasons such as having a reference of the hospital stay, feeling more assured of the care they were receiving, and feeling more involved in their care.